Everything is romantic for Faye Wei Wei

If ever there was a true romantic, it would be Faye Wei Wei.

​“I often make little books for people that I love,” says the artist, calling in from a studio overflowing with vintage torches, bucketfuls of postcards and a black birdcage on the mantelpiece behind her. She picks up objects, pushing them close to the camera to show off a small detail or spinning the screen around to reveal an explosion of paint pots and photos on the floor.

​“For my best friend Diana, I got this beautiful gold, antique box with a rose on it. I put lots of little objects inside and made her an egg shaped poetry book with a solid gold rose necklace and some dandelion seeds. It was really beautiful.”

For some, stories like this may sound a tad mawkish. But for Faye, romantic art is simply an extension of her life. Her large-scale paintings portray gauzy dreamscapes of friends, lovers and the natural world that fascinates her. Often rendered in pastel colours with painterly brushstrokes, they’re childlike and fantastical – a deeply unironic devotion to magic and vulnerability.

Born in Tooting, South London, to Hong Kongese parents, Faye studied Fine Art at London’s Slade School before exhibiting at Situations gallery in New York and Galerie Kandlhofer in Vienna.

After a holiday spent sketching portrait-ready friends in Athens, she’s back to work with Éditions Lutanie’s release Portals, a new book containing 280 pages of her paintings and drawings.

​“I often paint my friends and people I love,” she says. ​“They always look like themselves, but there’s also something [of myself] in all the portraits, too, so it’s [like] an interchange of souls within the painting. It’s quite a loving act, painting someone you care about.”

Hi Faye. How’s your day going?

Good. I’m trying to finish this painting for the big wall in La Camionera. It’s nice to have a piece in London that my friends can go and visit.

Could you talk us through your artistic process?

I just take a look and see what feels piercing to me on that day. Painting itself is so fun and I enjoy the materiality of it, but I think what’s difficult is figuring out the composition or what the image will be. I don’t really plan the majority of the time – I just go and find something to anchor the painting like a figure or a flower or a chandelier.

Do you believe in muses?

Yeah. I think portraits become stronger when they have the eyes of someone you love. Recently I was really in love with this boy and sometimes he’d feel really sad, so I wanted to cast a love spell on him through the paintings. I painted him sleeping under a snowdrop with a small blizzard of snow coming from the snowdrops, enveloping him in a safe blanket of love.

He was a muse for a while, but my best friends Jonathan and Leopold are probably the people I paint the most. They’re such beautiful boys. When you draw portraits of people, there’s such an intimacy there – people are flirting with themselves when they’re having their portrait drawn, because they’re trying to look their best or most like themselves. They know it’s a moment that will be captured forever.

You have such a distinctive style. Has your art always looked this way?

No. I guess I’m naturally drawn to certain colours. At Slade, I started with doing abstract paintings and, for example, I would paint the pathway of helicopter seeds falling. I’m really interested in poetry. [Gerald Manley] Hopkins has a poem called The Windhover which follows a bird’s flight and is about the innate beauty of nature. I was really interested in trying to portray the poetics of that within painting, abstraction and poetry –I think they pour into each other so that’s what I was doing during my BA. But then I found abstraction a bit limiting and moved into figuration.

Which artists do you find most influential?

I watched this amazing documentary about [German conceptual artist] Joseph Beuys in New Mexico, at this tiny cinema during a painting residency. I love his work so much and he’s an artist that has really affected the way I draw and paint. He would often paint with ferric chloride, which is an acid you use to bite the plate when you’re making an etching. I think he taught me how to know when something’s finished – sometimes you have to let the painting be a painting and not try to make it a depiction of reality.

People often write about your work in relation to an interest in mythology. Does that still hold true?

Yeah, that’s quite an old idea but I’m very interested in self-mythologising through painting. You can reveal parts of yourself, or secrets, through the painting. People get to know me through my work, or [at least] they think they do.

I like to paint people I fall in love with a lot, because even though it often doesn’t last, I’m making [up] mythology for the love that we had. One time I was painting this boy that I liked and I felt so embarrassed! I had to hide the painting when he came to my studio and then later we broke up in a graveyard which was so dramatic. I obviously like to romanticise everything in my life…I’m going on a date on Wednesday and we’re going to give blood together. I really want to ask them if they’ll let me keep some of my blood so I can paint with it… I wonder if his blood and mine are slightly different shades of red.

Blimey, Faye. That sounds intense. What are you reading, watching and listening to right now?

I just finished Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. It’s so epic. And in terms of music I always listen to sad girls! I love Lana Del Rey and Adrianne Lenker.

I also really love the black and white film Cleo from 5 to 7. She’s so me. The main character has a gorgeous day, crying, buying a hat, giving it away and living her life in her beautiful apartment full of crazy things.